Saturday, October 18, 2008

Philosophy

This is what I believe.

No one wants to be good. Everybody wants to take whatever they want, eat whatever they want, have sex with whatever they want. They want to hurt people who disagree with them or who they don't like. They want to do whatever they want without consequences. They want to do everything purely for the benefit it will give to themselves. Nobody wants to give to charity. Nobody wants to wait their turn.

Love is selfish. Everyone has a mother and father. Everyone has someone they care about. Many people have loved and been loved far greater than you have. Your friends and family aren't more deserving than anyone else's, no matter how important they are to you. Helping your loved ones is not bad, but it's not any more righteous than helping yourself. Humanity is not good just because lovers give each other dopey looks or parents die to protect their children.

The only reason people act good is because they want to think of themselves as good people. The only morality that humans adhere to is the guilt imposed by society for violating social mores. There may be an absolute system of ethics beyond ourselves, but each person only feels guilty for doing what they've been taught is bad.

Therefore, the only thing necessary to get people to commit the most horrendous crimes is to convince them that they don't need to feel guilty about it. That's not a human, it's a Jew. It's a fag. It's a nigger. It's a Tutsi. It's a witch. It's a criminal, a monster, a fucking animal. Torture them, rape them, shoot them, round them up for the gas chambers. You don't have to feel guilty. You're following orders. Society made you do it. You were driven to it by the circumstances. You're not a man, you're a machine, a soldier, a cog in the great machine.

It's so pathetically easy to convince people that they're not doing anything wrong. All it takes is an excuse, a rationalization, a reason why the normal rules don't apply to you or the people you're hurting. And when justice is demanded, it's so easy to explain why the killers were just bad people deep down and the genocidal maniac was not a man but a monster.

It's not true and it'll never be true. It needs to stop. Every homeless person, king, priest, investment banker, school kid, humanitarian, and murderer is just like you. You must judge them as you judge yourself and judge yourself as you would judge them.

At the end of things, at the end of all things, humankind is indivisible. There's no us and them. There's just us. We're so alone. All we have is each other.